In the opening chapter of the book, Teresa Requena- Pelegrí examines the social and historical context for the construction of a manly ideal in the 1920s to then focus on the analysis of the white male body in one of the most well known literary texts of the decade, Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926). Initially, she concentrates on the development of a standard of manliness at the turn of the 18th to the 19th centuries to later trace its consolidation in the 20th century. Drawing from the work of gender theorists such as Raewyn Connell and George Mosse, Requena- Pelegrí proceeds to examine the notion of the whole male body in the context of modernity, and relates it to the technological advances and the new possibilities for both